


the art of war

by sevenzeroseven



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Character Study, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Introspection, Multi, Post-Canon, Spoilers, ie: that season ending killed me too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 03:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16441781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenzeroseven/pseuds/sevenzeroseven
Summary: Time has never passed so slowly for Alucard than when he’s alone.Truly alone.[a short fic where Alucard reflects after Sypha & Trevor leave.]





	the art of war

Time has never passed so slowly for Alucard than when he’s alone.

Truly alone.

His father thought his mother had left him when she died, but she hadn’t. He knows she hadn’t. Because a piece of her still burns within him, like a dying ember. Maybe one day that part of her will go too. But for now it’s alive and well—and wounded. He desperately wishes Dracula could have seen it. That they could have grieved together. Now Alucard is left to grieve for the both of them.

There are days he can’t stand the silence. Days he wanders ghostly halls and hears his father’s footsteps in his own. Hears a woman’s laughter where there’s only his breath dusting dirty shelves.

The only time he forgets is when he gets lost in his studies. Decades could pass. Centuries, even, and he wouldn’t notice. He only brooks the surface to check that they haven’t, that his sense of time hasn’t yet dwindled and died. That the Belmont ruins look the same shade of dilapidated. That the sun still rises, and that there’s still some _hope_ left for him.

He could spend millennia hoping, and he wouldn’t know for what.

For whom.

There’s something cruel about the half-humanity his mother gifted him—or is it full? He doesn’t know what to do with it.

How to long for something you’ll never be because you’ve been left with all your other species’ damning traits.

How to daydream about better times, a cart shared between two souls and one not, and know that’s all they’ll ever be—memories. Daydreams.

He hears about the stirrings of war. They come to him like the gurgles of a stream, the occasional vampiric trespasser desperate to lay their ashes at his father’s grave. The fanatical mourners. The ones who love him for his name’s reverse.

They call him king.

And he only laughs at them.

King? His father never had an heir. In the end, he'd become just a mad despot in a self-made cage. He never thought that far.

But they keep coming, and soon the stream turns into a flood. Alucard’s army, they call themselves. Dracula’s legacy.

Throughout all of this, he wonders. What they’ve been up to, whether they’ve heard, whether they’ll come, whether he’ll meet them if he accepts this ridiculous mantle as he feels he must.

He’s not his father. He can’t shut himself away and let others fight his battles. But are these really his battles?

He’d rather go it alone or with two humans than the entirety of the night horde.

It’s a terrifying thing to love that which death can take away. No, not death. Death takes everything away with enough determination. Old age, then. Illness.

Time.

There’s never enough time for someone like Alucard. Like his father. After all, you can only feel time when you’re in it. What if you’re out? What if you become the measure? Less of a man and a being than an archive. Will he become an archive? Rotting away in his own mausoleum of knowledge, bitter and broken?

Or is it better to sleep? Sleep and see if, when the world’s forgotten, he hasn’t also?

Alucard looks over his childhood home, Trevor’s childhood home, and thinks:

Fuck that.

Because when he thinks of these gifts (one forcibly taken, one freely bequeathed), the only warmth there is the thought of the people who gave them to him.

His mother, his childhood.  
Trevor, his livelihood.  
Sypha, his selfhood.

There’s nothing left for him here. At least, not alone.

So, he declares his war. Not for vampirekind. For humankind, that they won’t have another despot to fear, but also for himself. For this world he loves to keep nourishing the two people he loves. Just two for now. But more will come and go.

A selfish wish, but he’s young. He can be a little selfish.

(Perhaps it’s worse to love something that time can’t touch. Harder. To that end, he can only hope.)

**Author's Note:**

> hMMMMMMMMMMMm have this short thing bc that ending man :') pls reunite the ot3 in s3 mmmmmmmmmm


End file.
